Nigerian Muslims bury 600 after Christian slaughter

A Muslim community leader in the Nigerian town of Yelwa said yesterday that 630 bodies had been buried there after an attack by Christian militia on Sunday. The previous estimate of the death toll was 300.

Survivors of the attacks said many people were still missing and the final death toll could reach 1,000. Another 600 were said to be seriously wounded.

"We buried a total of 630 people yesterday, 1,500 people were injured and 600 were taken for emergency treatment," the community leader, Abdullahi Abdullahi, said.

There was no independent confirmation of the toll. Many residents fled Yelwa after the attack.

Before the violence, at least 350 people had been killed in three months of tit-for-tat fighting between the Christian Tarok and Muslim Fulani over fertile farmlands at the centre of Africa's most populous country.

Mr Abdullahi showed a Reuters correspondent a foul-smelling area of freshly turned earth where he said some of the people killed in Sunday's attack had been buried. Nearby a mosque had been gutted by fire.

A Nigerian Red Cross worker, Umar Mairiga, said he had seen another site where 350 people had been buried.

One Yelwa resident, Suleman Umar, said he thought 1,000 died in the invasion by the heavily armed Christian militia. "I would have preferred to die because I lost everything in the attack. My family, my property. I lost all in the attack," Mr Umar said.

Charred bodies were still lying in the streets yesterday as some exhausted women and children returned to the devastated town. "We have been burying the dead for the past four days," one of the residents, Shehu Abdullahi, said.

"Even today we moved several bodies from culverts and wells. We are overworked. We are hungry. The able-bodied men still around are very few. That's why we still have some corpses littering the streets."

Mr Mairiga said he had attended to dozens of victims yesterday. "We have given aid to 58 people with gunshot wounds, machete wounds and fractures. Some have mortal wounds. One boy has his intestines still protruding from his stomach," he said.

Nigeria is a battleground for the world's two main religions, which share roughly equally its population of 130m people.

Religious violence has killed at least 5,000 people since 2000, when 12 northern states predominantly inhabited by Muslims established Islamic sharia law.